Vital is a spectral warping wavetable software synthesizer plugin created and maintained by Matt Tytel, of Helm fame. Cross-platform, it's available for the linux platform (64-bit only) in both free and non-free flavors, the latter including a variety of extra goodies, depending on the price. (See the Vital.Audio website (link below) for more details.)
Vital offers a load of interesting features, including: 3 oscillators which provide various waveforms as well as drawable wavetable and text-to-wave capabilities, a sample-noise sound source, two filters with a variety of filter types, three DAHDSR envelopes, LFO's and a lot of modulation routing possibilities. A series of effects are provided, such as Chorus, Delay, Compressor, Flanger, Reverb and even an additional Filter. Microtonal scaling and MPE support are provided. Preset management is straight-forward, with search and category features, and presets can be deleted or moved among directories from within the synth dialog window itself.
Vital's sonic capabilities and visual displays, while useful, do come at a price in terms of CPU usage. To improve performance and avoid possible x-runs or audio glitches on some systems, it is possible to set the oversampling rate from 2x (default) to 1x (in the Advanced tab -- see second screenshot above), although this is however not a global setting. Closing the Vital GUI window while performing may also help reduce DSP load.
Below are links to some Youtube videos that provide more details about using Vital.
Free Vital Synth: Full Tutorial
Some patch banks available (free and commercial) on the Vital page at KVRaudio.com HERE.
